Norm Coleman has just made his appeal more difficult.
Al Franken extended his lead in the Minnesota Senate race to 312 votes Tuesday, after about 350 improperly rejected absentee ballots were added to the ballot pool.
{mosads}The total is 87 more votes than Franken led by at the beginning of the day and all but assures that Coleman’s current court challenge will fail.
Coleman’s lawyers have indicated they had little chance, given the small number of absentee ballots added to the count, and have signaled they will appeal to the state Supreme Court and possibly federal court.
But further appeals were actually made more difficult by the Coleman campaign’s challenge, which sought to add thousands of rejected absentee ballots to the count but wound up with fewer than 400 ballots, which wound up breaking sharply for Franken.
Franken led by 225 votes after the recount phase. Coleman is challenging the result before a three-judge panel, and the absentee ballots were the centerpiece of his effort to overturn his deficit.
Of the 351 absentees added to the count Tuesday, 198 went to Franken, 111 went to Coleman and 42 went to a third pile, “other.”
Coleman attorney Ben Ginsberg said that the campaign would file an appeal with the Minnesota Supreme Court within 10 days of the three-judge panel’s final ruling, expected to come sometime later this week.
“As you know, the court today opened some 350 ballots and counted them up,” he said in a conference call with reporters. “I think that is an unfortunate and sad development in that there weren’t 10 times more than that.”
Ginsberg said the campaign would challenge the so-called “Friday the 13th” ruling, which they charge put in new standards for considering ballots and would effectively eliminate a number of other ballots that were included in the current tally. They also accuse the trial court of ignoring evidence that different standards were used to count ballots, which Ginsberg argued invokes a violation of the Constitution’s “equal protection” clause.
Ginsberg also projected optimism that the state Supreme Court would be a more amenable venue for Coleman to press his case.
Franken attorney Marc Elias suggested it is time for Coleman to give up litigating his loss and allow the state to have two senators.
“The question is not whether he has the right to appeal, but whether filing an appeal is the right thing for Minnesota,” Elias said.
He also played down the idea that the case could be tied up in court for years, as has been suggested by National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) Chairman John Cornyn, a former state Supreme Court Justice in Texas.
Elias suggested Cornyn doesn’t know Minnesota law like he knows Texas law and said he might have been fed some bad information.
“I can’t even envision where that kind of a time frame would come from,” Elias said.
This story was updated at 4:14 p.m.